According to Marco De Rossi, head of AI at MetaMask, the Ethereum shrewd contract standard enabling trustless communication of artificial intelligence agents on the network will “likely” be deployed on the mainnet on Thursday.
Further development of ERC-8004 has been “frozen”. […] and we’ll go to mainnet mid-week, probably around Thursday at 9 a.m. EST.” he said On Monday, De Rossi on the Telegram channel for the creators of the protocol.
Ethereum X official account on Tuesday he said the protocol will be available on the mainnet “soon”.
“By enabling discovery and portable reputation, ERC-8004 enables AI agents to interact across organizations, ensuring that trustworthiness is available everywhere,” it explained.
Request for Comment Ethereum proposes a standard way to register and validate AI agents. Developers can implement it in their shrewd contracts and it does not require any changes to the Ethereum network itself.
Proposal explains that the protocol is designed to discover, select, and interact with agentic AI across organizational boundaries without prior trust, enabling an open agent economy on the blockchain.
The AI agent economy is coming to Ethereum
The standard solves two basic problems: how to find AI agents and how to check which agents are reliable.
While protocols such as MCP (Model Context Protocol) and Agent2Agent handle agent communication, skill advertising, and task orchestration, they do not deal with discovery or trust.
“To support an open, cross-organizational agent economy, we need mechanisms to enable agents to be discovered and trusted in untrusted environments.”
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“Ethereum is uniquely positioned to be the platform that secures and regulates AI-AI interactions” – Davide Crapis, AI lead at the Ethereum Foundation, he said on Tuesday.
Ethereum is uniquely positioned to be the platform that secures and regulates AI-AI interactions.
The ERC-8004 standard appears on the mainnet. pic.twitter.com/sjMziiPuaQ
— Davide Crapis (@DavideCrapis) January 27, 2026
AI services can work together without gatekeepers
According to Telegram’s developers, the standard will also work on layer 2 of Ethereum Base, but they did not provide a time frame for implementation.
Resist uses x402, an open payment protocol developed by Coinbase and launched in May that enables instant, automatic stablecoin payments directly over HTTP, enabling AI agents to pay for services themselves.
The launch of ERC-8004 is the missing piece that enables AI agents to become economic entities, not just isolated, siled tools.
“This opens up a global marketplace where AI services can interact without gatekeepers,” the Ethereum account on X said.
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